Dave the Diver Developer Reveals Next Game, and It’s Unexpected

Dave the Diver developer MintRocket has revealed its next game, a PVP team-based arena battler called Wakerunners. The studio’s first project,released in mid-2023, is a whimsical pixel-based adventure game. Its appealing gameplay loop sucked players in, leading Dave the Diver to be an unexpected viral success, surprising even the developer.

That success, however, also led to an unforeseen controversy at the end of 2023. MintRocket, despite its indie vibe, is actually a subsidiary of Nexon, a large South Korean video game publisher with offices in multiple countries. Despite this, Dave the Diver was nominated for Best Independent Game at The Game Awards 2023, which many people considered to be unfair for the “true” indie games that it was competing with. In the end, however, it didn’t matter as Sabotage Studio’s Sea of Stars ended up taking home the award.

MintRocket seems to have already moved on to two new projects, both of which greatly differ from Dive the Diver. A trailer for one of these games, Wakerunners, was recently released, showcasing some gameplay for the top-down team-based PVP arena battler. Set in a dystopian sci-fi world, Wakerunners looks nothing like what fans of Dave the Diver might expect, and that’s because it’s being developed by a different internal team at MintRocket. However, players won’t have to go in blind because a demo for Wakerunners will be made available during Steam Next Fest in early February.

According to a PC Gamer interview with MintRocket, the demo will feature seven playable characters and five game modes. The number of players on each team will either be 4 or 5, depending on the game mode, and matches can be expected to last about 10 minutes. However, although Wakerunners is a team-based battler, director ChaeHyun Lim has stated that the game focuses less on cooperation and more on just having fun with each character. As such, players will be able to change characters on the fly, adjusting for their current opponent. And as